A look at Samsung’s handset evolution through the ages

Before the Galaxy S IV comes out, we'll take you from brick phone to Android.

In just a few days, we're hoping to get a glimpse of what's next on the horizon for Samsung in the Android realm—the Galaxy S IV. With rumors cropping up that it will have 3D eye-tracking, a bigger display, and a thinner chassis, it has us pondering how far Samsung mobile phones have come in recent years. Looking back at the company's offerings—from flip phones to touchscreen handsets—Samsung has always followed along with current trends in the mobile phone's evolution. So we've pulled together this walk down memory lane to look back at the devices that have kept Samsung relevant all these years.

While we can't include every single handset that Samsung has ever released—there are far too many to account for and not all were available in the United States—we wanted to look at representative examples that highlight how the company's handsets have changed through the ages. Some were sadly difficult to dig up, so if we happened to miss your favorite Samsung handset, leave some memories in the comments.

Back in 1983, before cellular phones were considered necessary commodities, Samsung launched its mobile initiative. The hope was that it would be the company's bread and butter. In 1988, after much research and development (plus a failed car phone), the company revealed the SH-100 handset (pictured here), or "hand phone" as it was referred to in Korean.

During this time, Samsung only sold about one or two thousand units of each handset model. Talk about a tough crowd.

In 1993, Samsung launched the SH-700, marketing it as one of the first "ultra-light" mobile handsets. It was certainly a far cry from some of the chunkier handset offerings from rivals like Motorola. This model only weighed about 100 grams.

Along with other handset makers on the market, Samsung eventually adopted the flip phone form-factor and stuck with it for years. Here's the SPH-A500, which debuted on Sprint in 2003 and was considered stylish and compact for its time.

In 2003, the SCH-i600 was Samsung's first Windows Mobile 2002 phone and its first 3G phone. The handset was pretty smart for the time—it had an SD card expansion slot, which was also SDIO compatible. That meant you could tack on a Wi-Fi card or camera to the phone. Windows Mobile 2002 also integrated with Outlook and synced contacts, calendar appointments, and e-mail from your computer. "A big plus for mobile professionals," CNET wrote in its review of the SCH-i600.

In 2004, Samsung launched its first CDMA- and GSM-compatible world phone. The A790 had a built-in camera and 2.35-inch display, but no speakerphone, conference calling, or native e-mail support.

The MM-A800, a candy bar-shaped slider phone, made its debut in 2005 on Sprint. It was trumpeted as the first 2-megapixel camera in the US. Sadly, it didn't have the hardware capabilities to work on the carrier's newly born 3G network.

In late 2007, the attractive U600 launched with a sleek chassis and a thin form-factor. It included Bluetooth and a 2.2-inch screen. This device also swapped out the traditional trapezoidal navigation that was standard at the time for a four-way circular button.

The Samsung BlackJack's 3G capabilities and push e-mail capabilities were quite attractive in 2006. Originally available on Cingular, it was geared toward the business-centric and productive task masters, and this model went up against major competitors like the Motorola Q and T-Mobile Dash.

At the time, Samsung drew fire from RIM for including the word "black" in the name. RIM argued that consumers would confuse its BlackBerry and the BlackJack, and it believed that Samsung was merely capitalizing on the name.

Samsung eventually went the all-touch direction for its mobile phones in 2008. The Behold, pictured here, was one of the many phones that year utilizing an all-touch interface and Samsung's TouchWiz UI. These days, TouchWiz is now standard on the company's many Android handsets. Back then, the UI featured new "flash 3D effects," gesture controls, and haptic feedback.

Back in 2009, the I7500 was one of Samsung's first Android phones. The handset featured a 3.2-inch AMOLED touch screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, and a few of the Google apps that we probably take for granted today. It also boasted integrated GPS, an expansion slot, and 11.9mm "thickness."

The Galaxy S set the tone for the rest of the Galaxy series as a high-end Android smartphone. Other Galaxy "spin-offs" shortly followed, like T-Mobile's Galaxy S Relay 4G, but they weren't a part of the main "Galaxy S" line. If you're excited about the upcoming announcement, you can probably thank this one for starting it all.

In November 2010, Google CEO Eric Scmidt showed off the Nexus S, the Android-powered smartphone that both Google and Samsung had collaborated on. It was third in the line of Nexuses and the first for Samsung. It featured an Exynos 3110 processor and 512MB of RAM, but it didn't have an expansion slot and it topped out at 16GB of internal storage.

It feels like only yesterday that the Galaxy Nexus arrived on the scene. It was originally unveiled in late 2011 and featured Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

We're getting closer to Samsung's latest handsets. The Galaxy S II was showcased in 2011 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Thanks to some help from the Galaxy S II, Samsung was able to overtake Apple's iPhone in smartphone sales during the third quarter of that year.

The Galaxy S III is Samsung's best-selling smartphone to date. It's helped the Korea-based company dethrone Apple's global market share. Not to mention, the "Galaxy" line of smartphones has now become synonymous with the word "Android."

Galaxy Camera deserves a mention. A real actual camera grafted to an android phone that's only missing a calling app, stopping at 3g/wifi only. Kind of a strange idea, but I'd really like to see them try it out as an actual phone one day.

Thanks for the interesting trip through history, Florence. Amazing how fast telecommunications technology advanced. Radios and telephones merged into cellphones.... cellphones in turn have merged more and more with computers. What's next?

Has anyone on Ars ever done a macro-scale technology advancement article? It seems to me like the pace of development, as of late, somewhat outstrips the technological advancements from earlier centuries. Or is this just perception skewed by my personal exposure/experience?

I hate my OG Galaxy S (VZ Fascinate) so much I'm not sure I'd ever buy a Samsung phone again but I'm not sure if my issues are Samsung, Verizon or Android's fault. The lack of an official update past Android 2.3 is definitely Samsung's fault but even after applying custom rom of 4.1 I still get crashes, lock-ups, GPS issues and sometimes it just straight up reboots.

Both of them still work despite the 300 falling off the roof of my car while I was backing up, and then promptly being run over by my car, and the 500 surviving a fumble into a toilet as I was trying to hurriedly put it into my pocket. (also, they used the same power connector between the two, but the shape of the dock prevented you from being able to use it without cutting it up)

Thanks for the interesting trip through history, Florence. Amazing how fast telecommunications technology advanced. Radios and telephones merged into cellphones.... cellphones in turn have merged more and more with computers. What's next?

Has anyone on Ars ever done a macro-scale technology advancement article? It seems to me like the pace of development, as of late, somewhat outstrips the technological advancements from earlier centuries. Or is this just perception skewed by my personal exposure/experience?

I am not talking about android. I am talking about the actual phone. Even google told samsung their designs resembled the iphone too much. They went as far as to clone the connectors.

I hate my OG Galaxy S (VZ Fascinate) so much I'm not sure I'd ever buy a Samsung phone again but I'm not sure if my issues are Samsung, Verizon or Android's fault. The lack of an official update past Android 2.3 is definitely Samsung's fault but even after applying custom rom of 4.1 I still get crashes, lock-ups, GPS issues and sometimes it just straight up reboots.

The issues you're experiencing now may be a result of the custom ROM you're running. Have you tried different ROMs? You might have better success.

Samsung (and most other Android vendors) definitely gets a Fail for their shitty support for older handsets, though.

It's actually pretty sad to see how little innovation in form-factor we've seen since the iPhone established the defacto smartphone form factor.

Why no dual-screen flip-phone? Why no flip-out (rather than slide out) keyboards? Why no attempt at basic hand-grips? Why no slots for a bluetooth headset to snap into (and charge from!?!).

Give Android manufacturers like Samsung, Moto and others credit for going ahead with sliders, and BB-style keyboards (but that's probably so they can spend half as much on a smaller screen). But still, why the almost-total stagnation?

I hate my OG Galaxy S (VZ Fascinate) so much I'm not sure I'd ever buy a Samsung phone again but I'm not sure if my issues are Samsung, Verizon or Android's fault. The lack of an official update past Android 2.3 is definitely Samsung's fault but even after applying custom rom of 4.1 I still get crashes, lock-ups, GPS issues and sometimes it just straight up reboots.

The issues you're experiencing now may be a result of the custom ROM you're running. Have you tried different ROMs? You might have better success.

Samsung (and most other Android vendors) definitely gets a Fail for their shitty support for older handsets, though.

Ya I've tried a bunch of roms, even the "offical" 2.3 rom has issues. At this point I'm just waiting for my contract to be up in a few months and debating if I want to stay with Samsung/Adroid or make the jump to something else.

I regret not seeing more truly pre-historical phones. Maybe that's because before the Nexus and Galaxy, Samsung had not released many iconic handsets.

A good testament to the ginormous number of phone models released by Samsung is that I used two phones from Samsung and I saw in this gallery two phones that looked like my old Samsungs, except they weren't exactly the same ones.

My first (and first cellphone) looked like a more modern version of the SPH-A500. I think it was an X450. I used it for quite a few years until battery capacity began to prove to be more and more short-lived. With such a phone, it meant it barely lasted more than two days instead of the usual seven to ten days. I liked its nice and useful LED, always there to quickly tell me whether I had unread messages, missed calls, low battery, there was even a mode in which receiving a phone call or a message would solely activate the LED!http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_x450-pictures-614.php

I didn't like these phones that much though. They always had some rather enduring little flaws, such as hiding the most commonly used accented characters under a ton of unused ones. Or merely having a resistive touch screen that wasn't that efficient, plus having to deal with those buried accented characters. I'm not even mentioning their rigorously limited memory which forced me to repeatedly clean up the SMS or the utter piece of crap their "syncing" software happened to be. I think I still have some parts of them on my computer as it never uninstalled properly.

While I guess the latest Galaxy or Nexus phones from Samsung are truly great phones, I didn't really wanted to buy another, in my view, infuriatingly imperfect, Samsung phone when I bought a smartphone.

Ah, my first cell phone in 2000 was a flip down Samsung Sprint phone with a nicad battery (no vibrate on ring feature which at the time were built into lithium batteries only). I recall that it was $229 from Radio Shack - 500 minutes for $50 no contract. First call received while on my bicycle, and I discovered much to my amazement, that I could turn my head while talking. Everyone I was in cars on cell phones at the time could only look straight ahead.

A couple years later with a later model Samsung, I bought a data cable and went online. I used that data cable for four years with Sprint, and then several more with Verizon through perhaps five Samsung models - all with the same proprietary data cable. When I switched to Verizon, I made sure the data cable would work before I left the store.

The Blackberry copy is blatant. What was the outcome of the case? I've googled but I'm finding a lot of card games and no reporting of the legal outcome.

I had a SCH-3500 too...

According to my searches, Blackberry sued Samsung for Trademark infringement. Basically, they thought the Blackjack name was too close to Blackberry. From CNET:

"The suit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. RIM is seeking an injunction against the sale of the new BlackJack phones. In the complaint, RIM said Samsung's use of the "BlackJack" name "constitutes false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution."

So, it wasn't about the look of the phone or anything like that. Back then things were more reasonable. My Atari 800 had a DOS like command prompt. All the 8-bit computers had similar looking command prompts. I don't remember people suing each other over things like that...

You didn't mention another Samsung feature phone which I still think was pretty cool just because of its size and full functionality for the time SGH-F210 really small swivel form factor phone with good MP3 player capabilities (including Micro SD slot) and FM Radio:http://images.google.com/search?hl=en&s ... 66&bih=651

Thanks for the interesting trip through history, Florence. Amazing how fast telecommunications technology advanced. Radios and telephones merged into cellphones.... cellphones in turn have merged more and more with computers. What's next?

Has anyone on Ars ever done a macro-scale technology advancement article? It seems to me like the pace of development, as of late, somewhat outstrips the technological advancements from earlier centuries. Or is this just perception skewed by my personal exposure/experience?

I am not talking about android. I am talking about the actual phone. Even google told samsung their designs resembled the iphone too much. They went as far as to clone the connectors.

Guess what. Samsung lost a case vs Apple. They found some of the stuff infringed. The judge made adjustments based on genuine problems with the verdict.

At this point, listening to all the whining is like listening to some used-to-be-star prattle on about how entitled they are and crap when in reality..... they weren't all that to begin with and FAILED TO KEEP UP WITH THE TIMES.

You're f*cking HIGH if you honestly think NO ONE ELSE would have EVER come up with the crap Apple did. If you look at how stuff was progressing, it was really a matter of time. Apple struck at the right time, and actually did a product right for once. Congrats to them. /golfclap What's going on now is what we call "resting on your laurels". In case that concept is too hard to grasp, here: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/rest ... urels.html

They created one product that was a hit..... and then created multi-sized variants of the same shit. See: iPod Touch and iPads. Oooooooooo. Such innovation. With the iPods, by and large, each generation is an iPhone minus the cellphone components. Hardly innovative. The iPads, when you get down to it, are up-sized iPhones. They use a lot of the same software and have been tweaked a bit.

I want to see what someone else comes up with next at this point. Thank you Apple for being the trendsetter. Quit crying that everyone is copying you. The most sincere form of flattery is imitation.

Now.... can we drop this f**kin issue, or are you going to keep on crying like some bitter person whose bf/gf left them for someone else and can't get over it?

Edit: This is the last time I'm posting re: Samsung v. Apple crap. I'm tired of it and moving on. It's gotta start somewhere...... let it begin.

Touchscreen with no keypad, with the interface being a grid of icons, you say?

I had this around 2001 and I loved it. Years ahead of its time.

And oh yeah, it came with a desk cradle charger and an extra battery!

Not only was this 6 years before the iphone1, it had thousands of 3rd party apps already the day it came out. When the iphone first came out there was no app store and it didn't allow any other apps than what was built in. By todays standards it was practically a dumbphone.

I had a HP IPAQ circa 2001ish or something. Had GPS, WIFI, GPRS, Bluetooth the works, third party apps. I remember being confused when iPhone came our and wondering why everyone though it was good. It just seemed like yet another feature phone to me, took them ages to catch up. My IPAQ had tom tom navigator and work processors and all *shrugs*. Its amazing how one can rewrite history.

As to the article, it was interesting but seemed to be missing many phones in the line-up that would have shown a more incremental change.